Jeff Orlowski used to be what he calls "a zero-inbox guy." He was diligent and disciplined about keeping up with all his email communications, making sure he read every one and responded to most.

Last week, a few days after a short respite from a busy schedule, Orlowski opened his email and counted 11,000 missives, a whopping 3,600 of them unread.

He's no longer able to call himself "a zero-inbox guy," but Orlowski isn't complaining. A heavy inbox load is just part of the job for the 28-year-old director of "Chasing Ice," the documentary made by a group from Boulder that's on the short list of potential Oscar nominations.

Last month, the Academy Awards tabbed "Chasing Ice" as one of 15 full-length documentaries that made the first cut from 126 eligible pictures. The list will be trimmed to five on Thursday when this year's Oscar nominations are announced.

"Just being short-listed is a huge honor," Orlowski told the Camera. "Where we were a year ago, we never would have expected any of this. Our whole team has been really humbled by the response to the film."

The film follows Boulder-based photographer James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey, a project in which Balog and a small team set time-lapse cameras at remote sites in the northern hemisphere to record the receding glaciers.

Supporters of the film say it serves as an eyewitness account to the effects of climate change. J. Ralph, the composer and musician who created the film's haunting musical score, calls Balog's time-lapse cameras "the ultimate security cameras for Planet Earth. Those security cameras ... capture the crime."

A member of James Balog's Extreme Ice Survey team, which is featured in "Chasing Ice," provides scale in a mass of crevasses on a glacier in Iceland.
(Courtesy photo)

A visually stunning film, "Chasing Ice" first gained notice at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and has created a buzz as it has played across the country since. The Boedecker, the cinema in Boulder's Dairy Center for the Arts, added six additional screenings of the film last month after the first five sold out before the cinema's monthly calendar was even printed. The Boulder Theater will screen "Chasing Ice" Wednesday and Thursday nights as the film's crew awaits a potential Oscar nomination Thursday morning.

Not a bad run for a first-time director. Orlowski was a 23-year-old student at Stanford University when he talked his way onto Balog's small crew in 2007 to serve as a photographer to document the EIS work. Orlowski had a background in still photography, and working with Balog, a renowned nature photographer, appealed to him. Orlowski had been cinematographer on a few short films -- he knew how to handle a camera -- but he didn't consider himself a filmmaker.

After amassing hundreds of hours of footage and realizing there might be a film to make, Orlowski first asked Balog to let him make a documentary about the EIS sometime in 2007. About a year and a half later, Balog consented, Orlowski said.

The film is co-produced by Jerry Aronson (the veteran filmmaker and former longtime head of the University of Colorado Film Studies program) and Paula Duprè Pesmen (who produced the Oscar-winning "The Cove," among other titles). Aronson taught film to young filmmakers for 34 years. When Orlowski approached him in 2009 about becoming involved in "Chasing Ice," Aronson sensed the first-time director might have what it takes to see a project through to its finish.

"Jeff had that passion that told me this guy is going to do this; this is going to happen," Aronson said.

Much of the rest of the team that made the film was based in Boulder and Denver, too.

The film "Chasing Ice" documents the effects of climate change, such as this image in Disko Bay, Greenland, of 20-story-high icebergs that have broken off from the Greenland ice sheet and are floating into the North Atlantic and raising sea level. (Courtesy photo)

"It's a place that allows for creativity and freedom and has a progressive mind-set about different issues," Orlowski said of the Front Range film scene.

Ralph was a key player who isn't from Colorado. Duprè Pesmen had worked with Ralph before -- he composed the score for "The Cove," directed by Boulder's Louis Psihoyos, and Ralph was compelled by the rough cut of "Chasing Ice" he saw.

"It was extraordinarily arresting and hypnotic," Ralph said. "So I wanted to compose something that was both propulsive and hypnotic but, at the same time, wrought with tension and unrest."

And, yes, that's Scarlett Johansson singing the Ralph-penned song "Before My Time" over the final credits. Ralph, who had previously worked with the actress, asked her to sing the song, and she learned and delivered the haunting rendition in a single day.

Not long after recording the music, Orlowski took the film to George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in Northern California for a final sound mix. The long weekend of mixing wrapped just in time for Orlowski to hand the finished product to Sundance for a special screening for the esteemed festival's volunteers in January 2012. "Chasing Ice" earned the festival's Excellence in Cinematography Award: US Documentary.

Orlowski was part of the team that faced logistical and physical hardships for months during the EIS treks, and he had to teach himself how to edit a film on Apple's Final Cut Pro software when he settled into two makeshift editing rooms at Aronson's Boulder home beginning in 2009.

Orlowski and the production team are also heavily involved in the distribution of the film. But Orlowski said the biggest challenge in making "Chasing Ice" was fundraising.

"Mostly because we didn't have the connections or the relationships to people who would typically fund a project like this," Orlowski said of raising funds during the early part of the process. As it turned out, two-thirds of the film's budget was donated, he said. In addition, friends and family pitched in what they could to help make ends meet.

What's Orlowski's advice to young and aspiring filmmakers?

Figure out what film you want to make, be prepared to commit to it fully and go make it.

"The film industry is difficult to break into," he said. You can intern or apprentice under someone to get a foot in the door, he continued. Or you can make your own movie and do it well enough that the festival circuit will screen it, giving the film an opportunity to be seen by a wider audience.

"My advice to a young filmmaker would be to figure out how you can make your film -- whether it's with friends' or family donations, or whatever -- then make your film as good as you possibly can and keep your fingers crossed," he said.

With the Academy Awards nomination announcements coming Thursday, many involved in "Chasing Ice" are still crossing their fingers.